


a boy and his dog

by Arcafira, SkreeBat



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Antichrist Adam Young (Good Omens), Aziraphale's Bookshop (Good Omens), Aziraphale's True Form (Good Omens), Background Relationships, Canon-Typical Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Crowley's True Form (Good Omens), Dogs, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Happy Ending, Hell is a shitty office, Light Angst, POV Adam, Post-Almost Apocalypse (Good Omens), Post-Canon, Tadfield, blood in the context of nightmares, but Eric is just doing their best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:46:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25451116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arcafira/pseuds/Arcafira, https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkreeBat/pseuds/SkreeBat
Summary: A week before Adam’s eighteenth birthday, Hell’s whispers return, and Adam’s power begins to surge. Shadows stalk him in Hogback Wood, and Dog shakes his earthly form for the first time in order to protect Adam. Seeking answers, Adam reunites with Crowley and Aziraphale at the bookshop and takes them up on the promise they made to him years ago at the airbase. Hell can’t restart Armageddon, but Crowley suspects that they will do their best to cause trouble on earth—and Adam’s instability is key to their plan.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 48
Collections: Good Omens Mini Bang





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of the Do It With Style Mini Bang! Thank you to all the mods for organizing this event. I had a wonderful time collaborating with SkreeBat who’s done such wonderful art for the fic.

In the week before his eighteenth birthday, the voices start again. They whisper in his dreams, not quite the same as before. These are new messages. The only reason he doesn’t panic is that, for now, they remain confined to sleep. For now, he can explain them away as nightmares and nothing more.

His parents have been making increasingly stronger hints that he should be thinking about uni, saying, “A smart boy like you should want to get out of little old Tadfield, see the rest of the world.” His dad says this gently, kindly, with an encouraging hand on Adam’s shoulder. Adam nods and goes to his room to sulk. It’s one day, however, when his mum says, “If it’s Dog you’re worried about, we’ll look after him while you’re gone,” that breaks Adam.

“I’m not going anywhere without Dog!” he yells, and a bit of that old energy surges through him—angry and wild.

His parents blink at him across the dinner table, stunned to silence. Adam stands abruptly, nearly knocking over his chair. He mutters apology after apology, can’t look his parents in the eyes. Before he can process what he’s doing, he’s out in the back garden with Dog whining fretfully at his heels.

“Can you hear them?” he asks. The voices in his dreams are stronger each night. They say different things than they did years ago _. Reclaim your power. Reclaim your glory. Remember who you were._ He does not want to remember that fleeting but terrifying version of himself. He does not want to remember the confusion and anger, the fact that the power to ruin the world forever was just at his fingertips and he had almost grasped it. The thing that haunts him more though, the thing that makes him hate himself most, is the way he’d made his friends look at him, the way he’d betrayed them.

It's rare that they meet at their fort in Hogback Wood these days. Wensleydale has become consumed by the world of college prep and is always away on a tour of some university or another. Pepper has found new friends in the school feminist club she co-founded. Brian is often holed up in his room playing a video game and spilling drinks into his carpet. Sometimes he invites Adam over for a round of some popular first-person shooter. Adam isn’t bad at the games, but they don’t hold his attention. To his parents’ concern, Adam has taken to wandering the woods alone with Dog at his side.

Still, when Adam does text them, their replies are quick, and they make time to meet at their old base. The childhood toys that they’ve left there are faded, red plastic now cracked and pink from the sun. Their flag whisked away by some storm. Wooden swords half buried in the dirt and growing moss. Adam goes to his old throne out of habit, but it is too small for him now and wouldn’t hold his weight. He stands awkwardly in front of it and faces his friends.

“What is it Adam?” Pepper starts in first. 

“Do you remember that summer?” he asks, and he doesn’t need to explain more. In the years after, they’ve all taken to using the euphemism on the rare occasions when they acknowledge that _the end_ almost happened. “I’m afraid it’s happening again.”

Wensley looks at them. “I haven’t noticed anything different,” he says.

“Yeah, that’s because you never look up from your books,” mutters Brian.

“And you’re always shooting strangers on the internet,” Wensley returns. There’s no bite in his tone, but Adam knows what this will devolve into if he doesn’t stop it.

“This isn’t about us,” says Pepper, and Adam is happy he doesn’t have to mediate this time. “What’s made you worry, Adam?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing has really changed. Not yet. Only, I feel these sudden bursts of anger like back then. And there are the whispers.”

Someone unfamiliar with the four of them might not notice the shift in the air, in their postures, but Adam does—the way they draw themselves up and lean ever so slightly away from him.

“You said it was over,” says Pepper.

“I thought it was,” says Adam. “But more and more I feel like if I really focused, I could change things, and I’m afraid—” He swallows and starts again. “I’m afraid of what happens if I change things while I’m angry.”

“What can we do?” asks Wensley.

“What about those two odd blokes who showed up at the airbase,” offers Brian. “The ones with the wings you talked about before. They’d know more than us.”

“Yeah,” agrees Pepper. “You went to them before.”

“I just needed to see you all again,” says Adam. He doesn’t say, _Sometimes I feel like something has chased me to the edge of a cliff_ . He doesn’t say, _When I’m alone in the woods, I feel like I could become something else._

“And we’re here for you,” says Pepper, then looks at the others and adds guiltily, “even if it seems like we’ve gone off in our own directions.”

They try to sit in their old places and talk about what they’ve been doing since they last saw each other, but the conversation is stilted and awkward. When they all eventually make excuses about things that need tending to back home, Adam bites down on the inside of his cheek and forces himself to smile.

With Dog’s head in his lap, he sits at the old base until nightfall. He doesn’t want to return home to his worrying and overly attentive parents. He doesn’t want their concerned looks and their gentle questions, much less. What would he say? _Just so you know, I’m the antichrist. Or was the antichrist, I dunno. Either way, it seems Hell is trying to contact me again, and that’s why I’ve been weird lately_. In the gathering dark, Dog’s head pops up and a growl starts in the back of his throat. The shadows are moving. Adam knows they are but also knows not to acknowledge them. These days, Adam doesn’t keep Dog on a leash anymore, and he circles Adam. The hair along the dog’s spine raises, and the rare red gleam lights his eyes.

“Dog,” Adam warns, but the hellhound isn’t listening to him. He’s sniffing the air and wandering towards the trees. He’s . . . changing. Sometimes when Adam looks at Dog and allows his eyes to slip into soft focus, he can see the form of a much larger creature, one tall, angular, and muscled. Something with menace. But right now, he’s not seeing the _shadow_ of Dog’s true form. He’s seeing him as he truly is for the first time. “Dog,” he says again, hesitant, addressing a being that is obviously not of this world. Their connection is still strong, but again, Dog doesn’t acknowledge him. 

Adam starts forward, heart pounding, when Dog suddenly springs into action, jaws snapping. There’s an unholy shriek, and Dog is baring his teeth at someone he’s pinned to the ground.

“Let them go!” Adam yells just as Dog sinks his teeth into their neck.

The form dissolves into dark mist, leaving no gore behind. Dog rounds as if to take down another, but the shadows are retreating. 

Adam feels his ears pop, and suddenly the night is clear with only the natural shadows under the trees. Dog trots happily back to Adam, shrinking down into his customary form as he does. Adam is shaking, and Dog paws at him and nuzzles his leg.

He doesn’t remember how he gets home, only knows that he does. He watches his hand open the front door as if it is disconnected from his body and is starting down the hall when his father comes stomping in from the kitchen. His mother is close behind him.

“We’ve been calling you for hours! Do you know what time it is?” his father exclaims, red-faced.

Adam stares at his father, taking in his features in pieces, unable to feel his anger. His mother rushes forward and gathers him in a hug.

“Where were you?” she breathes into his hair. “We tried calling your friends, but they said they hadn’t seen you since noon.”

Dog barks, jolting Adam into a response. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. It’s all he can manage. He shrugs out of his mother’s embrace and continues wandering towards his room.

“Don’t turn your back on us, young man! You owe us an explanation. You’ve been behaving mighty strangely these past few weeks,” says his father.

Adam stops, can’t summon up the energy to turn towards his parents again. “Leave me alone,” he mutters, but it carries the force of a command. His parents, silent and bewildered, turn back to the kitchen. “Don’t remember this,” he adds. 

When he gets to his room, he collapses on the bed. Sleep takes him quickly, and as soon as it does, he is seized by nightmares. The voices descend like a flock of screeching crows. He imagines putting his hands in a river and turning it to blood. He imagines tearing the sky. The people he loves parade past him, zombie-like, heading towards a dark horizon.

He wakes gasping for air. Dog’s paws are on his chest, and he is barking wildly. Adam rubs at his face, but his hands are tacky. He looks at them, and when the bleariness leaves his eyes, he sees that they are smeared with blood. He screams just as his parents burst into the room. “What—” his father is saying and stops when he sees Adam’s skin streaked red.

“You don’t see this. I wasn’t screaming,” Adam says in a rush. Again, that bewildered look settles on his parents’ faces, but the vague sense of concern remains. He hates that look, hates that he’s the cause of it.

“Are you alright, dear?” his mother ventures. She comes to settle on the edge of his bed, oblivious to the blood staining the sheets.

He leans away from her. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

She tries to smile and brushes his cheek with her hand. It comes away with a smear of blood she can’t notice. “How about I make your favorite breakfast?” she offers.

“Yeah, sure,” he forces himself to say. “I’d love that.”

It’s enough to make his parents leave him alone. As soon as they’re gone, he grabs a bag and starts throwing clothes into it. Then, remembers the blood and goes to wash his hands. The water stains pink, and Adam watches it drain, struck by the realness of it. He stares into the sink, dripping water onto the tile for far too long. Eventually, he returns to his room to finish packing his bag. Dog watches him, head cocked. “Come on, boy,” he says, and they’re out the back door just as the warm scent of waffles is permeating the house.

He vanishes again from his parents’ sight, but he knows they won’t worry because he’s decided they won’t. He goes again to the only place he knows he’ll find help—a small used bookshop in Soho, hoping fervently that its immortal inhabitants haven’t tired of the place and moved on. The sign is turned to _Closed_ when he steps up to the door. He raises a hand to knock, but the door opens before he can. Crowley is standing there, grim behind his glasses but not a day aged. He steps aside without a word to allow Adam and Dog past before closing and locking the door behind them.


	2. Chapter 2

Adam has no problem seeing them for what they really are, no soft focus needed. They stand next to each other as the opposite poles of one planet, one magnet, as if he can’t unsee their togetherness, can’t see one without the shadow of the other. That was the main cue on the airbase that Aziraphale and the red-haired woman had been two people: a disruption of poles, as if half a world were contained and diminished. 

Years have passed since he’s marveled at their wings. Given everything he knows about the nature of reality, something so simple shouldn’t want to make him stare, but it does. He’s in the presence of angels.

Where Aziraphale exudes a whole-body ethereal glow, Crowley is the opposite. The sharp fragments of his broken halo warp the space around him like a collapsed star turned black hole. Horns and claws turn him jagged. But none of this seems to unnerve Aziraphale, and Aziraphale  _ must  _ notice. All those clouds of unblinking eyes that are certainly a part of his body, yet a part of him that he has chosen not to fold into his physical corporation. That they remain relegated to the metaphysical doesn’t make them less useful, less watchful. Half are always lovingly turned towards Crowley; he is always feeding light and warmth into that collapsed star. 

Dog barks, reminding Adam of the task at hand. For a moment, he sees Dog towering over him and meets those glowing red eyes. Then he blinks, and Dog is a little terrier again, whining up at him.

“Right,” he starts. Focuses. He glances out the bookshop’s windows, but what he’s really doing is feeling, sensing. There are no shadows. He turns back to Crowley and asks, “Do I ever stop being, you know, the antichrist?”

Aziraphale worries the chain of his pocket watch and looks to Crowley.

“Seems not,” says Crowley. He removes his glasses as he did years ago in that other place and meets Adam’s gaze with those golden eyes. Adam feels as if he might be going to war with Satan himself all over again. “You’ve cast off Satan as your father. That much is still true. But you’ve changed something else, haven’t you?”

Adam looks to Dog as if for answers. “No. Nothing,” he says.

Crowley frowns, looks at Adam’s hands as if he can see the blood he’d washed away that morning. Adam pockets his hands.

“What about your friends, dear? The nice children who stood with you on the airbase?”

Both Adam and Crowley look at Aziraphale as if just remembering his presence. The angel shifts, ruffles his there-not-there wings.

“What about them?” says Adam a little more harshly than he means. He shrugs as if that will soften the words.

“They seemed very . . . ah, grounding,” ventures Aziraphale.

Pepper, Brian, and Wensley move past him, unseeing, towards the dark horizon. He reaches a blood-stained hand towards them, smears them red, but they do not stop, do not turn. They are leaving him again. He wants to ruin the sky, the earth. The desire sparks in him and spreads like fire over parched ground.

“Oi! Kid!” Crowley is shouting.

Adam comes to on the bookshop floor. Dog paces circles around him, and overhead he’s sheltered by a shimmering canopy of wings, half night sky and half day. When he squints, he thinks he might see the pinpricks of stars in Crowley’s feathers. Aziraphale’s seem as sun-bathed clouds. He puts his hand to his suddenly pounding head and sits up. Aziraphale looks pale and shaken. Crowley has schooled his expression into something determinedly neutral. Aziraphale says Crowley’s name, and the sound carries the weight of some unspoken knowledge between them.

Crowley helps Adam up. “You okay?”

“The whispers are back. I see things when I fall asleep. They feel stronger than dreams. And there are people following me.”

“Humans?” asks Aziraphale.

Dog growls.

“Demons,” says Crowley. “We’ve seen them lurking here too. I suspect you’re what they’ve been waiting for. They knew you’d eventually come looking for us.”

“Dog scared some of them off last night. But what do they want?”

“They can’t restart Armageddon, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Aziraphale says.

“But they can try to control you through your connection to Hell. That’s what the visions are. They want you to be unsettled, scared, fragile. That’s when you might do things you don’t mean to.”

Aziraphale bustles out of view towards the back of the shop.

“Come on, kid, you look like you’re going to faint again,” says Crowley, leading Adam to a leather sofa so plush that he knows, once he sits, he’ll have trouble getting back up in any elegant fashion. Dog scrambles up next to him and lays his head in Adam’s lap. Just then, Aziraphale comes into view holding a steaming white mug and startles when his eyes land on Dog. As if he’s seen a monster.

“Ah, well, he’s very well-behaved, I see,” says Aziraphale, recovering and offering the mug to Adam. Adam takes the mug, noting the angel-winged handle. It is awkward to hold, and he cups it in his hands instead. Dog eyes the angel as if insulted.

Adam notices the look. “He’s smarter than people want to give him credit for. He’s not  _ really  _ a dog. What’s this?”

“Chamomile,” says the angel, fidgeting with the hem of his waistcoat and avoiding Dog’s gaze. “To help calm the nerves.”

Adam doesn’t much like chamomile. He drinks it anyway, finding the warmth surprisingly soothing. He hadn’t realized how much the past few hours had exhausted him, how the travel had worn him, how much the visions drained him. He could go to sleep here, he realizes, on this oversoft sofa with its velvety throws, Dog’s head a warm and comforting weight in his lap.

Aziraphale seems to sense this. The tension eases from his shoulders. “Why don’t you rest up here? Crowley and I will keep watch and discuss what can be done to help you.” He glances to his partner for confirmation.

“What the angel said. Rest up.”

“Yeah, okay,” he says, pillowing his head against the back of the sofa. He is in the presence of angels. He is safe.

* * *

When Adam rouses from sleep, the sun has set and the shop is dim. Dog is belly-up in his lap, paws twitching in the air as he dreams. Aziraphale and Crowley’s nearby whispers drift to him just beyond the shelves. He hears a bottle uncork and the sound of a heavy pour.

“You’re going to be a bad influence on me. I thought we were looking out for the child,” comes Aziraphale’s voice.

“I  _ am _ a demon. Being a bad influence is what I do,” Crowley tries to tease, but the sigh that comes after betrays something weighing on him. “Besides, I can sober up if he needs us. Just need to take the edge off this.”

“Take the edge off what?” asks Aziraphale.

“Oh, I know you had to have sensed it too.” A pause. “Right. Not lovely enough for you to notice it, eh?”

“What are you on about, dear boy?”

“When Adam fainted, it felt . . .” He trails off. “I know what it’s like to feel like you’ve lost someone close to you, like you’re in danger of losing everything good and left alone to face this terrifying thing.” The definite  _ thunk  _ of a glass being set down. “I just can’t imagine what that must be like for a human kid.”

“I see.”

Another pour. Silence. The air grows taut like the moment before something bursts. Pressure blooms in Adam’s chest.

A low growl rumbles through Dog, and in an instant, he snaps awake and is on his feet. Again, his eyes shine red. Somewhere in the shop, a chair screeches across the floor. Dog drops his earthly guise, is suddenly a towering muscled creature. “Aziraphale!” Crowley shouts. Adam can’t keep up. Dog is a sleek black blur hurtling towards the doors of the shop. Adam scrambles after him just in time to see him will the doors of the shop open with a clash as he bolts into the night.

“Dog!” he screams. He is running and he doesn’t know why or where he’s going. Crowley catches him and holds him back, says something that Adam can’t process. He fights his hold and breaks free, sprinting past a wide-eyed Aziraphale who’s just appeared around a bookshelf. 

People are screaming and fleeing a scene in the street. The concrete has broken open, and a mass of rotting limbs are tangled around Dog, dragging him into the earth.

Red power courses through Adam. He wants to grasp it. Is afraid. For Dog, for himself. For what will happen if he becomes the antichrist again. Can one throw off that influence twice?

_ You have the power. You have the glory. _

“Adam!” Someone shouts his name, but the sound is drowned by the whispers. He steps forward, the world moving slow. The flutter of a red jumper in the corner of his eye as someone hurries to safety. The white glint of Dog’s fangs as his jaws close around a wrist. He sinks. 

_ I can’t lose you too _ , Adam thinks.  _ Not you too. _

Dog sinks. The earth will close over him, and he will be gone. Lost.

He sees his friends’ backs against a red sky. Sees their backs as they leave him in Hogback Wood.

Dog sinks.

“Give me back my dog!” Adam screams. Commands. But the hands do not stop. Adam is only vaguely aware that he has left the earth, that he hovers over a rioting mass of limbs. He reaches for Dog. The hands grab for him, grasp a shoe, a shirtsleeve. He tries to kick them away, can’t. Dog struggles against them, snaps, howls.

A different pair of hands anchors him. Crowley pulls him away from the rotting hands, away from the portal in the ground, back down to earth. Away from Dog. He screams again, but he is securely in Crowley’s arms, and the concrete is smooth as if Hell had never come for them.

Adam sags against Crowley, lets the power drain away. “I’ve got you, kid,” he says.

The street is empty save Crowley, Adam, and Aziraphale. It’s quieter than the middle of a city should ever be.

“I’m not a kid,” he mutters. It sounds petulant and ridiculous, and he knows it. It’s easier than asking what’s next, less scary than letting go and crying.

Crowley ignores the comment. “Angel, the humans--”

“Yes, yes, I’ll see to it,” says Aziraphale, hurrying into the dark.

Crowley helps Adam back into the shop and locks the door. The small sound seems loud in the aftermath of everything, its promise of security useless. Adam wonders if Crowley’s locked the door out of mere habit.

Adam eases himself to the cool floor and puts his face in his hands. Crowley stands by him and waits.

* * *

Certain times were best for harvesting apples that didn’t strictly belong to oneself (but  _ were _ publicly accessible). As Adam grew older and stayed out later, he found that the end of a long summer day was the perfect opportunity--those days when the sun hung above the horizon as long as it possibly could, stretching its light far into late evening. His grumpy neighbor having settled down with a pipe or a newspaper or whatever grown-ups did, Adam could recline under an apple tree and watch the last of the sunset with an apple in hand. If he remembered to bring his pocket knife, he’d cut slices for Dog, and they’d both return home sticky with apple juice.

This is the warm memory Adam clings to in the empty hours before sunrise. 

* * *

Aziraphale returns early in the morning, having tracked down every human who witnessed the scene and convincing their memories that it was a forgettable nightmare. “And I’m sorry, my dear, but I’ve taken the extra precaution of consecrating the nearby grounds. Can never be too cautious with these sorts of things.” He takes one look at Adam, who obviously hasn’t slept since he’s been gone, and says, “Perhaps some strong tea would do us all good.”

Crowley shifts for the first time since bringing Adam inside and cocks an eyebrow above his glasses.

“I’ll just go get some water started,” Aziraphale says, hurrying towards the back of the shop. Crowley sighs and follows. “Angel . . .” he starts.

Adam feels like he has sand in his eyes, and as he forces himself up, he realizes that he’s sore from having been on the floor all night. His shirt sleeve is torn from the hand that grabbed him. He’s lost a shoe. Needs a change of clothes. Wants to shake the feeling of those blistered and peeling hands on him. The daylight starting through the windows seems at odds with what happened only hours ago. What feels like only minutes. If he hadn’t seen the portal close, he would have thought that, were he to go out onto the sidewalk now, the street would still be in ruins. His bag is on the sofa where he and Dog dozed. He unzips it, finds the trio of apples he’d stuffed hastily inside. He hadn’t known if angels ate and it had been the only food he could pack quickly without facing his parents in the kitchen.

“I didn’t know if you’d like--” says Aziraphale, bustling into the room, and stops. He looks at the apple in Adam’s hands. “I see you’ve brought food. I have some biscuits and tea cakes. We could go out for something more substantial. You need to keep your strength.” He gives Adam another mug with angel wings. The one from the night before still sits empty on a side table. How many does he have?

“What was that?” says Adam. His voice is flat, doesn’t feel like it belongs to him.

“The damned reclaiming their own,” says Crowley, appearing beside Aziraphale. 

Adam rolls the apple between his hands. “They wanted Dog but not me.”

“My guess is that they want you here on earth where you’re more useful to them. The spike in power is why you’ve come to us, yeah? They can use that for their own gain, and by getting to Dog, they’ve gotten to you. Made you feel like you need to access that power. You almost did.”

The three of them turn towards the door in unison, sensing the disturbance just before the post slot squeaks open and a singed page skitters to the floor. Crowley is on it in a second and skimming the note just as a yowl sounds outside. Crowley throws open the door, and Aziraphale and Adam approach in time to see three figures in tattered black clothes on the walk in front of the shop. One writhes on the ground, smoke rising from their figure and flame licking their clothes to ashes. The two others stand back warily, looking between their associate and the bookshop. Finally, one of them shrugs out of their coat and tries to bat ineffectually at their flaming acquaintance.

“Oi! You!” Crowley starts forward with the note crumpled in his fist, and Aziraphale narrowly manages to catch and pull him back as the paper goes up in flames. 

“Watch the consecrated ground, dear,” Aziraphale warns.

“It’s him!” the three scream with something that looks like genuine terror in their identical faces. The smoking one scrambles up and falls back into their associates. “We’re just here as messengers, sir, no harm meant.”

“‘No harm meant’?” Crowley repeats incredulously, voice rising. “It’s a fucking ransom letter!”

The three back up slowly as Crowley advances, ignoring the consecrated barrier Aziraphale warned him of.

“Dear boy--” Aziraphale starts just as Crowley seizes. The demon hisses, and Adam sees him draw his wings in protectively. Adam concentrates and there is no smoke, no flame. Crowley steps across the consecrated barrier with only a minor spike of discomfort.

The three demons--Adam knows they can’t be anything else--are clearly awed by Crowley not also going up in flame. One of them still smolders. Their distinctively rabbit-shaped hair is singed. “The rumors were right,” one of them turns to whisper to the others, and they back away as one unit. 

People on the street are eyeing them, and Adam realizes how odd they must look to average people. Aziraphale escorts an older woman past the bookshop with a smile and flutters among the others out on early morning walks, bestowing each with a beatific grin and urging them that there is nothing to see. They nod at him with open faces and loosened shoulders as if his voice is enough to massage the tension out of them. Meanwhile, Crowley has caught the smoldering demon’s lapels and demands to know the meaning of the note they left.

“Who sent you with this, Eric?” he snarls as Aziraphale glides by with an oblivious woman in athletic wear.

“I’m not supposed to tell  _ you _ ,” the demon--Eric--squeaks.

A man busily tapping away on his phone hurries by without the need for any angelic assistance.

“Beelzebub? Dagon? Lower than them?”

Eventually, Aziraphale has effectively shielded them from human notice and stands by worrying his waistcoat.

“Lower,” says Eric. 

Adam finally leaves the bookshop’s doorway to join Crowley. The demons jump at his proximity. “We’re only messengers!” they say. “There’s a human phrase for this kind of situation, right? You lot should know.”

“Don’t shoot the messenger,” Crowley says with all his teeth.

And in that moment, instead of his demonic godfather, Adam sees Crowley as this other demon must--all horns and claws and fangs. 

Aziraphale is there easing Crowley’s hands off the demon. “Now, my dear . . .”

“What did the note say?” asks Adam.

Eric brushes off their half-burned coat when Crowley is finally pried off of them. “Hell has a list of demands should you want your dog back.”

Adam looks to Crowley and Aziraphale, then back to Eric. “I’m not doing anything for you lot,” he says. His voice is casual but carries the force of Truth behind it.

All three Erics blink as if Adam had suddenly shoved them. They exchange glances, bewildered. “Er, of course, Lord of Darkness, your disgrace. I’ll--” The three turn to cross the street. “--let them know.” The demons disappear into the tide of people, accepted by the crowd as just another group of harried workers off to some job.

“I’m going to Hell. I’m getting Dog back,” says Adam. “If you would show me the way.”

The angel and demon exchange glances, just as they did years ago when they pulled him out of reality and urged him that _he_ could change things. Once again, they are on his side.


	3. Chapter 3

Adam considers making a joke about going home for the first time--'home' being Hell--but he’s not sure if the threads of the universe would understand sarcasm and thinks better of it, doesn’t want to accidentally pull something out of shape. Now would not be a good time to go undoing the work of his 11-year-old self.

There’s some negotiating to be done. Aziraphale doesn’t want Crowley to go without him, insists that, were Crowley’s ex-coworkers to  _ try something _ , Aziraphale’s angelic nature could make a difference. The angel doesn’t elaborate on what he thinks could happen, but there’s a flash of fear in the look he gives Crowley. The gaze of his ethereal eyes turns vigilant. Adam can see the shape of a memory, how in the web of time it sits close to the end-that-didn’t-happen, but doesn’t want to pry. Apparently, angels entering Hell isn’t a new thing, he learns from Aziraphale, but if nothing is done to shield him, an angel entering Hell without permission would ring the metaphorical alarm bells. (Crowley informs them that Hell’s alarm system hasn’t been repaired in centuries and just makes a sort of awful wheezing sound instead of its originally designed unholy screeching. Crowley’d thought the choice a little cliché and uninspired, but apparently cliché delighted Ligur who’d been bewilderingly chosen to lead the security taskforce.)

That brings them to the present in which Adam is witness to Aziraphale and Crowley awkwardly insisting that technically, theoretically they should be able to inhabit the same corporation for the duration it takes to break Dog out of wherever Hell is holding him.

“Let me get this straight,” starts Adam. “You haven’t actually  _ done  _ this before?”

“We have,” says Aziraphale.

“We haven’t,” Crowley says simultaneously.

“Which is it?” asks Adam, biting down impatience. Impatience is bad. Impatience makes his skin prickle with power that could easily tip him over into anger, sparking a destructive feedback loop. “How did it work the last time you did it?”

“We have,” Aziraphale repeats slowly. “But it was quite unintentional.”

“So how did it happen?”

“You know, now that I’m recalling it, I’m not sure if we ever settled that argument,” says Aziraphale.

Crowley scrubs his hand over his face. “Angel,” he groans.

“I was standing here,” begins Aziraphale, going to stand behind his antique till. Adam and Crowley follow. “I’d just shut the drawer, and I was trying to explain to you--” He pokes a finger at Crowley. “--that I had  _ in fact  _ been to the Americas for a short while and there was a young woman who looked eerily like the lovely witch with the book and the bike and I swore she could have been an ancestor--”

“And  _ I said _ she could have been anyone, as long ago as that was,” says Crowley. “When you’re on the hunt for a book, you barely notice anything, let alone some random human on the street.”

“I wished I could just show you what I remembered because the memory was suddenly clear as anything.”

“I said you’d had too much wine because you had.”

“And then you leaned over the counter,” says Aziraphale, and suddenly Crowley is there, inches from his face.

“You’re too endearing when you’re worked up over something,” he says, and they are alone with their memory of the moment and their adoration for each other.

Adam doesn’t see how any of this is relevant and has quite lost track of how the current conversation relates to his original question, would have interrupted them if not for the fact that the auras of their halos are disturbing the reality around them. A wineglass appears at Crowley’s right hand before blinking back out of existence. The pair of sunglasses Crowley had pushed up into his hair reappear hooked in Aziraphale’s buttoned collar. Aziraphale’s hand has come to rest on Crowley’s cheek, and the void at his back folds in on itself, turning bright and starlight for a briefly brilliant moment. Adam turns away from the flash, and there’s a heavy thud. When he looks back, Aziraphale’s body is limp across the counter, and Crowley is suddenly dressed in the same beige suit. His hair has taken on a slight curl and faded to a shade closer to hot pink. 

His eyes, one blue and one full gold, take in his changed form, and he fists his hair in distress. “Angel, we are  _ not  _ wearing your clothes!”

“If we’re going into danger,” Aziraphale’s voice speaks from Crowley’s form, “we should be  _ comfortable _ at the very least.”

“Then I’m  _ very _ uncomfortable with my former colleagues potentially seeing me in tartan.”

Adam presses a fist to his mouth. “You should see your hair, then.”

Crowley’s combined gaze snaps up to him as if they’d forgotten he was there. “For Somebody’s sake, Angel,” he hisses, striding to a window to eye his reflection. As he’s busy running his hands through his hair, an eye opens in the fabric of reality and blinks at Adam. Then another, and another, winking open like the stars emerging in the night sky. The strip of exposed skin above Crowley’s collar ripples black with scales climbing towards his cheek. The ends of his fingers turn black and sharp as he continues trying to wish his hair back to its original color.

“Um, Crowley? Sir?” says Adam.

“What?” snaps Crowley, whirling to face him.

“Yes, dear?” follows Aziraphale’s voice.

Their halos clang together with the sudden movement, the fractured particles of Crowley’s drifting off and floating back. The sound stretches long, and none of them can speak while it does. Adam finds that he can’t compare the noise to anything. Not a glass bell, nor the soaring note of a choir. Not a scream, nor metallic screech. It is all of those things, and it is the sound of a world born and dying, of love found and nearly lost. It is enough to stagger even him.

Crowley, however, merely draws a fresh pair of sunglasses from his pocket and dons them with a shaking hand. He snaps, and he looks like himself again.

“Can’t be conspicuous, Angel,” he says.

The aura of their halos settles into a twisting mass of light eating dark, dark eating light. Crowley cracks his neck, and the spread of the scales stops halfway to his blue eye. The floating eyes blink patiently.

“Lead the way, dear boy,” says Aziraphale.

* * *

The entrance to Hell is not what Adam expected.

“That’s up to Heaven, over there,” says Aziraphale, pointing Crowley’s long blackened finger to a pair of escalators on the right. When he speaks, Crowley’s face shifts into the polite facade of a tour guide or a kindergarten teacher or someone whose job it is to be very mild and inoffensive--an odd juxtaposition in normal times made even eerier by the scales and the claws and the eyes. They keep their wings stiffly folded at their back, an array of black, gray, and white feathers. Adam thinks of their words to him at the airbase and tries to assign a similar quantity to them:  _ love incarnate, hope incarnate, balance incarnate _ . In the time it’s taken them to arrive at the nondescript office building, a small pair of horns have begun to sprout from Crowley’s hair, and some of Aziraphale’s floating eyes have turned serpentine, their metaphysical features solidifying themselves in the physical realm. Adam doesn’t know what it means and doesn’t know whether they know either, if it’s appropriate to ask. It’s clear when Crowley is back in control because the determined scowl descends once more, and as they sink through the illusory floor to Hell’s escalators, Crowley flips Heaven’s side a strong middle-fingered salute.

“Really, dear,” huffs Aziraphale as Crowley slouches them against the handrail of the escalator.

They’re silent for a moment before Crowley says quietly, “They were going to watch while they burned you alive.”

It’s so quiet Adam almost misses it. Crowley raises a hand, squeezes his own shoulder with impossible tenderness.

“Thank you for coming with me,” says Adam. “You didn’t have to.”

He can tell they’re watching him through the dark glasses. “No problem, kid,” Crowley says eventually.

The world becomes darker as they descend. The office lobby overhead fades from view. Adam’s ears pop. Dust and damp and mildew are thick in the air. Aziraphale draws Crowley’s body up so that they’re square-shouldered and rigid. 

“I’m with you, Angel,” Crowley murmurs as they gain the landing. His swaggering gait becomes somehow intentional, calculated.

A mess of rusting filing cabinets stretches before them. Stained manila folders scatter the floor. Broken glass from busted fluorescent lights crunches underfoot. Water drips somewhere in the distance. A tattered office chair languishes on its side, one of the wheels inexplicably spinning. Adam is careful not to brush against any of the discarded office furniture.

“Is this . . . a warehouse?” asks Adam, stepping over a fallen cabinet drawer.

“Ehh, it’s the storage closet.”

Adam stares up at all the space that yawns around them. “Right.” When he finds himself still struggling to understand the geography of Hell a full minute later, he asks, “So your main entrance leads to a storage closet?”

“Look, things were a little frantic at launch. Lots of burning and anguish made it hard to consider the long-term. We weren’t some sleek millennial startup, sorry to disappoint.”

Aziraphale’s eyes turn just before a heavy door closes somewhere beyond them. Crowley grasps Adam, and they duck behind a particularly imposing desk. Footsteps scrape towards them.

“I dunno what Hastur thinks we’re gonna find in here. I mean, everything’s rusted. It’s too sodding  _ damp _ , that’s what I keep telling him.”

“That leak in central office has been getting worse since about 1654,” came the reply, seemingly from the same speaker.

“But no one wants to listen to us! Go fetch us a new cabinet, Eric, mine’s rusted out. Go feed the hellhounds, Eric, nevermind that the mean one nearly discorporated your mate.”

Crowley slips silently around the desk and behind the two Erics as they come into view. “What’s this about a hellhound, boys?” he asks.

They screech, whirl about to face him, and scream again at the cloud of eyes. Crowley removes his glasses, inspects them, and polishes them against his suit jacket. Adam thinks he can see Aziraphale’s care in the gesture. When Crowley looks up, it’s deliberate. The two demons stare, frozen by his eyes. One, an icy blue; the other, blazing gold, its pupil the sharp edge of a knife.

“Perhaps you could point me in the right direction.” Aziraphale’s words, Crowley’s voice. “The antichrist’s hellhound . . . Would it happen to be with the others in the decommissioned hallway in the fourth circle?”

“N-no your disgrace. Fifth circle.”

“Fifth?” Crowley raises an eyebrow.

“Hastur’s office.”

“Perfect,” Crowley hisses, replacing his glasses. “Always wanted that office. Conveniently positioned first door on the left. Now,” he says, stepping up between the Erics and placing his arms over their shoulders, turning them away from Adam’s hiding place, “Let’s talk about these complaints you have. I’ve never liked the organization of this room either. Hazardous, I’d say. What about you and I hang around here for a while and think about creating a  _ safe  _ and  _ unobstructed _ path through to the entrance.”

Adam takes his cue and creeps towards where he heard the door close when Eric entered. Once through the door, he finds himself in a dank, poorly-lit stairway. At each landing, the doorways are marked with scratches in the wall, like a prisoner in a movie marking the passing days. He’d just passed the fourth door and is descending to the fifth when he turns back, remembering Crowley’s words. There are  _ other _ hellhounds? He’s not sure why he ever thought Dog would be the only one, but now he finds himself looking towards the fifth door below and the one behind him. If the other hellhounds are anything like Dog, he speculates, they’d love running through the woods and chewing shoes and dozing in a back garden. They’d make good friends. He takes a deep breath, pulls his hood close over his head, and opens the door to the fourth circle of Hell.


	4. Chapter 4

Packing for a trip often means carefully weighing practicality against the anxiety of finding oneself unprepared. In Adam’s case, he’d packed haphazardly in his hurry to leave and couldn’t have been expected to prepare to literally go to Hell. Hence, his present predicament in which he finds himself to be the only person wearing any amount of color. He slouches down inside his blue jacket as if that will make him less conspicuous, but the souls wandering the halls don’t seem to care. There aren’t any demons here. At least, not for now. Just empty-eyed souls staring down the eternal distance of the hall, occasionally shuffling forward, stopping, and staring some more. They bump shoulders, oblivious to one another’s presence. Adam weaves among them, careful not to touch. He doesn’t know what will happen if a living human were to touch a soul.

A row of bolted steel doors on the right seem the most likely place to hold a hellhound, and at his approach, Adam hears a shifting and scraping within.

Placing a hand against the metal of the first door, he says, “I’m a friend,” imbuing the words with Truth. “Will you follow me? I promise to lead you someplace nice.” He slides away a small rectangular portal in the door and cringes at the piercing screech. Calm red eyes stare at him from the darkness within. “Okay,” he says, and unbolts the door.

The first hellhound pads out of its cage, great claws clicking against the concrete floor. They look much like Dog with the exception of a long scar along their muzzle and a notch of skin missing from their ear.

“I’m Adam,” he says, offering a hand. The hellhound nuzzles their nose into his palm and turns to the three remaining doors.

Adam does the same for them all, and soon he’s encircled by four towering, glowing-eyed hounds. “Wicked,” he says, smiling up at them. “I have some friends I want you all to meet, but first, we need to free one more of you. He’s a close friend of mine and can totally vouch for all the fun we’ll have. Would you help me?”

The hounds bow their heads to him and part to allow him through.

The door to the fifth circle makes the worst noise of them all and sticks when it’s nearly halfway open. Adam turns sideways to squeeze through into the empty hall, and the hounds poke their heads through, one atop the other.

“Maybe just--wait for me? I’ll only be a sec.”

The first door isn’t far. Hastur’s name is lettered upon it in a cramped hand. Someone has crossed this out with a permanent marker and a collection of colorful insults crowd the door. By their faded look, someone tried to scrub these away and gave up. As if to compensate, Hastur, presumably, used red paint to add the title _duke_ above his name. The paint dripped as it dried.

Of course, the door is locked. Adam has tried to avoid using his powers thus far, wary to call any attention to himself, but when he hears the low whine behind the door, he gives up and wishes the lock away. Tries the door again. It doesn’t budge. He tries to wish the door away. Tries to imagine a different door into being. Tries to dematerialize the physicality of the wall so Dog can pass through. None of it works. Dog whines again. Something deep and immaterial has been forged to specifically bar him.

They knew he would come. They’d prepared this trap.

Adam pounds his fist on the door. Frustration rises like a tide. He takes a breath as it washes over him, pushes it down. The hellhounds yowl and snap their teeth, pawing at the hall door. The sound echoes down the empty hall. Adam tries to hush them, but they are frantic, barking warning.

“Didn’t anticipate you letting the others out,” comes a voice from a dark stretch of the hall. “I didn’t want to believe Beelzebub when they said you’d turned out  _ good _ .” The voice sneers the last word.

Adam breathes. “Give me back my dog.”

The figure continues to lurk in the shadows. “You answer Hell’s demands, you get your dog. It’s that simple.”

“Give me back my dog,” Adam repeats. His skin prickles with the power coursing just beneath his skin. “You will give me back my dog.”

“Don’t you want to hear our terms first?” When the demon steps into the light, their form undulates, writhing with insects, before it settles into a mostly-human shape. A misshapen toad clings to their head. They advance.

Whispers tickle the edges of Adam’s mind, looking for a hold.  _ Who could rule you? Show him the power _ . Adam twitches, tries to shake the voices off. Through the clamor of whispers, he holds to Crowley’s warning, the truth. They want him unsteady. They want him to lose control of his powers. They want the chaos he’s worked years to tamp down.

The sound of scrabbling claws against metal intensifies, the hounds clawing at the door. Adam closes his eyes against the sight of the approaching demon and tries to imagine that other place, tries to imagine angels at his side urging him into a future of his own making. The realization snaps into place. He may not have the power he wants over the external world, but he does have power over himself. The source of the problem.

His pulse speeds. He considers his words carefully. If he is careless, he realizes, he could unmake himself.

His mouth is dry, but when he speaks, his words carry the force Truth that reaches back through time and cuts at the webs of reality and history. It is the voice that crumbled Satan himself. “I may be the antichrist, but I have no infernal power here, on earth, or on any other plane.”

As if slamming a heavy door, the voices quiet. The red light in him goes out. He staggers and catches himself on the closed door, sagging against it. With a simple wish, his power is gone, leaving him with the fatigue of someone who’s not slept or eaten for days. Immediately, there is the ache of something deep and fundamental having been ripped from his flesh. He thinks he might unwind. The past stretches out behind him--his friends, his parents, the airbase. He senses things he shouldn’t be able to remember: the swinging rhythm of someone carrying him in a basket, a nun casting the first earthly light across him, his mother’s tired face peering down at him nearly eighteen years ago.

When Adam looks back at the demon, he looks as if the earth has moved beneath them.

“It’s just reality,” Adam says.

The hounds burst through. One goes for Hastur. One nudges their way under Adam’s arm to offer support. The other two go to work on the barred door. A commotion starts down the hall, and it takes all Adam’s energy to hold his head up and look. Crowley is running for them. Hastur trips over his own feet in his haste to flee in the opposite direction, screaming, “It’s him, it’s him!”

Crowley glares after him, and there seems to be some internal debate on his and Aziraphale’s part because a couple beats pass before they turn to Adam. “What the heaven kind of shift was that, kid?” he barks just as the office door goes down.

Dog is suddenly circling and barking and scrabbling at Adam’s legs, but Adam thinks that if he leans down to offer a scratch behind the ears, he wouldn’t have the strength to get back up. Dog seems to understand and shifts to his true form. Another hound lifts Adam by the back of his collar as if he’s nothing more than a little pup and settles him on Dog’s back. Adam clings to Dog and finally lets his eyes slip shut.

“We should really be on our way,” Aziraphale says politely as a demonic cacophony starts up at both ends of the hall.

Adam is vaguely aware of being enclosed in a pack of giant hellhounds, vaguely aware of a disembodied serpentine eye hovering over him, watching. He knows they’re back in the storage closet by the openness and the smell. He tries to sit up. The noise has followed them. Around him, the hellhounds’ tongues loll from their mouths. Their eyes gleam red with delight. One howls, and they all take up the call. As they run, a new pack is being born with Adam at its center. A pair of mottled gray wings circles overhead, doubles back, returns. A guardian angel.

They must be nearly to the escalator. Darkness closes in. They are ascending.

* * *

Daylight hits Adam’s closed eyelids, and he groans. Several tongues lovingly assault his face, and he groans again.

“Shouldn’t linger here too long, kid.”

Adam looks up to Crowley standing over him, hand on one hip. He squints, looks to the glass doors. “And you can’t go out there like that,” says Adam, realizing that without his true sight he’s seeing Crowley and Aziraphale as they truly look in the physical world--and they do not look human.

Crowley’s first set of horns has fully grown in, and he’s sprouting a second. His hands are covered in black scales. His nails are well on their way to being legitimate claws, and he’s radiating what looks like sunlight. The eyes turn and blink at each other.

“Sure. Nice sharing a body with you, Angel, but apparently we can’t hold ourselves together like this.”

“Quite right.”

Crowley snaps--with some difficulty thanks to the claws--and Aziraphale’s limp corporation is suddenly in his arms. He bends to kiss him, and a moment later Aziraphale blinks up at him. The sunlight and eyes are packed away. Crowley’s scales and horns and claws recede as if simply being folded back under his skin. Aziraphale stands and straightens his bow tie.

“You lot,” says Crowley, nodding at the pack of hellhounds. “You can’t go out there like that either.”

They quirk their heads questioningly, and Dog transforms first, barking and wagging his terrier tail at them. At this, the others seem to understand and take up various forms: a german shepherd, a yorkshire terrier, a lhasa apso. The final hellhound struggles a bit and settles on a gray and white mid-sized mixed breed. Aziraphale and Crowley lead the way, holding hands, but none of the humans they encounter on their walk to the bookshop notice the angels among them. They are too busy marveling at the well-behaved trail of leashless dogs following Adam.

He finds a childhood impulse creeping back, the need to invent amusement for those around him. These former hellhounds need homes, and he thinks that his friends have not changed so much that he would misjudge what they might appreciate. Perhaps the gray and white hellhound would become fast friends with Brian; the shepherd with Pepper; the lhasa apso with Wensley; the yorkshire terrier with Newt and Anathema, who would suspect something but smile nonetheless.

Yes, he can picture this reality.

He can change things, Crowley had told him. And this time, he doesn’t have to bend reality to do it. He knows, by the time he returns home, that he will have found the right words again. He will know how to begin meeting his old friends in the new places they’ve arrived in their lives.

  
  



End file.
